Enoch

At different intervals throughout my childhood, I wanted to be a scientist, a detective, a writer, and various other stuff. I am now an attorney, working for the U.S. government. I never remember wanting to be a lawyer, which is OK, I guess, because the work I do is nothing like the common perception of attorneys. (If my career goes as planned, I'll only see the inside of a courtroom if I decide to contest a traffic ticket.) Even in college, I knew lots of people who really wanted to go to law school. 90% of them were jerks, so I assumed that what I wanted could not possibly be the same as what they wanted. After a couple years of seeing what a bachelor's degree (econ & history majors) and very poor job-finding skills got me, though, I gave law school another thought. I got into a pretty good one, and here I am 4 years later, a member of the VA state bar and 8 months into my career as a bureaucrat. I'm reasonably happy with it so far.

R.E.M.-- Turn You Inside-Out I believe in what you do I believe in watching you

I still had 3 saves from that game in my folder. Got rid of 'em. Now I'm down to 2MB, all of which is right here.

A 0 on the "tens" die, and 1-9 on the "ones" die give you 01-09. You get a 10 with a 1 on the "tens" and a 0 on the "ones." I had been using d10s to generate percentiles for years before I ever saw that someone made a d100. Edit: And I'm a d6.

Yuengling Lager. Better than the major American mass-marketed beers, and almost as cheap. And it's from Pottsville, PA, where both of my paternal grandparents grew up. I've been to a number of events (weddings & funerals) in the Catholic church right next to the old brewery.

Well I played a fair amount of Oblivion (with the latest OOO) today. I recently reinstalled it just to see how it looked on my new machine, but OOO makes playing it actually kinda satisfying. Sure, the characters, dialogue, story, etc., still suck, but the rethinking of the level scaling system and the more hand-placed enemies and loot make building your character rewarding and fun. But Oblivion is probably going to go on the shelf for a little while-- I'm currently downloading the much-anticipated 1.2 patch for Medieval 2: Total War. It's 613MB!! So that pretty much sews up my weekend.

I took a hot shower, which did seem to help a bit. I think I've got a heating pad around here somewhere-- I'll try to dig it up later today. I'd rather not go see someone today, since driving is pretty hazardous when you can't look over either shoulder. If it doesn't improve after a day or two, I'll get my girlfriend to drive me to the doctor. This is some kind of karma for spending most of the workday yesterday wishing that the weekend would get here. Ironic wish fulfillment sucks.

Gorillaz - Last Living Souls

Yesterday evening, I went to hang up a shirt. I bent my head down to hold the hook of the hanger under my chin while I buttoned the front buttons. As I did this, I got the worst kink in my neck I've ever had. It felt like someone was tagging me with a cattle prod right at the base of my neck, shading towards my left shoulder. A couple of ibuprofen and some fine Irish whiskey made the pain tolerable enough to sleep, but it was not a very restful night. When I woke up at around 6:30, it didn't feel any better than it had when it first happened. I took more pills (hooray for huge Costco bottles of generic ibuprofen!!) and waited for them to kick in. It's now a couple hours later and I've decided to call out sick from work. I felt like a total wuss leaving the message for my boss explaining why I was out, but it shouldn't be a problem. None of my current projects have any impending deadlines and this is only the second sick day I've used since I started there last August.

Here is a somewhat more literate version of what I think Sand is trying to say. (Not that I necessarily agree on all points.)

A glass of 2005 Guy Saget Vouvret. Just in case any of you didn't think I was enough of an effete elitist, yes, I do drink white wine. It was a bit sweet for my tastes, but also light and drinkable on a warm night.

Is #4 one of them jug of water that go on a water cooler (on its side)?

Orange juice. Washed down some scrambled eggs with mushrooms and mozzarella cheese in a tortilla.

Since I just wrote all this out in the PC pics thread, I figured I might as well throw it out here, too. CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case EVGA 680i mainboard (A1 revision) Core2Duo 6400 @ 2.13ghz Samsung 18X DVD-R drive (SATA) Seasonic M12 600W PSU 2 ghz Patriot PC-6400 RAM EVGA 8800 GTS 320 ("Superclocked" version) Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HD Netgear WG311v3 Wireless adapter LITE-ON SK-1788 keyboard Logitech LX5 wireless USB mouse Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers Samsung Synchmaster 941BW 19" widescreen monitor (1440X900) Vista Home Premium

Okay, I've finally gotten around to setting up the camera on the new computer. The pics are below. For reference, the components are: CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case EVGA 680i mainboard (A1 revision) Core2Duo 6400 @ 2.13ghz Samsung 18X DVD-R drive (SATA) Seasonic M12 600W PSU 2 ghz Patriot PC-6400 RAM EVGA 8800 GTS 320 ("Superclocked" version) Seagate Barracuda 320GB HD Netgear WG311v3 Wireless adapter LITE-ON SK-1788 keyboard Logitech LX5 wireless USB mouse Logitech X-230 2.1 speakers Samsung Synchmaster 941BW 19" widescreen monitor (1440X900) Vista Home Premium It's running well, although a bit warmer than I'd like. Temps are on the high side of "acceptable," with the CPU idling around 40C, and the GPU in the low 60s. The cheap PCI slot cooler I added under the GPU has helped a bit, although most of the gain was offset by an unexplained temp increase when I updated to the newest nvidia drivers. I'll turn the fan speeds up as soon as somebody releases a program allowing me to do so in Vista (AFAIK, there is none at the moment). Otherwise, I have had no Vista-related problems yet.

Jimmy Smith -- When I Grow Too Old to Dream The Hammond Organ has such a fabulous sound. (And it's a thousand times better live.)

Throw them back!!

Springsteen -- Darlington County. When I walk to the subway in the morning, I go by the courthouse for Arlington County. Whenever I look up at the sign (and don't have my mp3 player running something else), I get this song stuck in my head. More generally, there are a lot of things to dislike about Born in the USA, relative to Bruce's earlier work. It's overproduced (way too much synth-strings in the background of pretty much all the tunes), not very cohesive, overplayed on commercial radio, and some of the tracks are kind of corny ("Glory Days," "My Hometown"*). But still, there are some damn fine tunes on it, particularly this one, "Working on the Highway," and "No Surrender." * "My Hometown" may well be corny, but I still love it because I know its subject, Freehold, NJ, quite well. My parents grew up there (they were a few years behind Bruce in High School, although one of my uncles was on his Little League team), and my grandparents still live there. Actually, for the first 3 months of my life, my parents still lived with my maternal grandparents while their house in another town was being finished, so it can kinda be considered my hometown, too.

A good friend of mine is a Browns fan and occasional blogger on the state of the franchise. He agrees with you completely. I have some doubts, though, simply because Cleveland's QBs are all terrible, and they'll probably have an opportunity to take Quinn (or Russell, if Oakland ends up going for CJ). I hope that their management doesn't decide to pass on a QB simply because they think they'll be fired if 2007 goes badly, and they don't want to stake that on a rookie QB. In any case, the worst thing that Cleveland could do is what most mock drafts have them doing-- taking Adrian Peterson.

I'm waiting for patches/updates on the two games I really want to play right now: the 1.2 M2:TW patch, and the non-beta 1.32 version of OOO for Oblivion. The former release date has not been announced, but I've read on the Bethsoft forums that the latter should be out by Saturday. So I fired up a game of Civ IV: Warlords to pass the time. Got an interesting start as Mali, with a sickening amount of food resources around my capitol (playing on Prince difficulty), but no luxuries anywhere to be found nearby. Happiness, thus, is a major concern, which led me to break my normal practice and adopt Confucionsim as my state religion-- I usually avoid this so as not to anger my neighbors. The game looks nice on my new rig (once I figured out how to install/run it on Vista), although 1440X900 makes the text rather small. I'm also debating whether to try out Dark Messiah of M&M. It came free with my video card, so I'll probably give it whirl at some point. Any impressions?

Tom Waits -- Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six

Do you write romantic comedy screenplays or something? Note to self: Do not introduce Meta to [girlfriend's name].

Although, rather unlike Clinton, he was instrumental in the appointment of the man who replaced him.

I have no idea how authentically Italian the recipe is, but in America, when you order chicken parmesan, you get breaded boneless chicken breasts (either roasted or pan-fried), which are then simmered in tomato sauce with cheese on top (usually mozzerella and/or parmigiana). I usually include the parmigiana in the breading, and use a tomato sauce with lots of basil.

It was a beautiful weekend here in the Eastern U.S. I celebrated the weather by indulging in that most all-American of pastimes-- shopping! Got a pile of new clothes for work, made a run to the Costco for various goods (bottled water, beer, soap, etc.), and then did the normal weekly grocery shopping. Also, last night I made some very nice chicken parmesan, with lots of leftovers to eat during the week. As for today, hopefully I will find the replacement power supply for my new computer waiting when I go home (UPS tells me that the package is currently "out for delivery") so that I can finally get my new PC working like it should.